Prosodically-conditioned Syllable Structure in English

• Authors: Paula Orzechowska , Janina Mołczanow , Michał Jankowski
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper investigates the interplay between the metrical structure and phonotactic complexity in English, a language with lexical stress and an elaborate inventory of consonant clusters. The analysis of a dictionary- and corpus-based list of polysyllabic words leads to two major observations. First, there is a tendency for onsetful syllables to attract stress, and for onsetless syllables to repel it. Second, the stressed syllable embraces a greater array of consonant clusters than unstressed syllables. Moreover, the farther form the main stress, the less likely the unstressed syllable is to contain a complex onset. This finding indicates that the ability of a position to license complex onsets is related to its distance from the prosodic head.

Keywords

EN

English; lexical stress; onsets; phonotactics

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 167-178

Dates

published

2019-06-30

Contributors

author

Paula Orzechowska

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

author

Janina Mołczanow

• University of Warsaw, Poland

author

Michał Jankowski

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

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Identifiers

DOI

10.18778/1731-7533.17.2.04